5 Types of Apps for Facebook Pages Every Marketer Should Know

Facebook Apps expand the marketing potential for every page used by businesses. They’re great for gathering information, building brand awareness, driving user engagement and generating leads for future sales.

Every social media marketer needs to know the best one for their campaigns.

The apps that you choose for your page will obviously depend on your business type and the goal of your page. The process of setting up each new tab varies slightly according to the tab’s functionality, but it’s usually extremely straightforward as the app itself guides you through the setup process.

We’re not going to take you step-by-step through the process of setting up each of the apps mentioned in this article, but if you have any questions or need any help then, of course, you can get in touch with us through our contact page and we’ll be happy to help.

Here are some of the main app categories:

1. Lead Capture & Contact Forms

At Exposure Ninja, we’re big fans of building a nice solid email list.

Building an audience on social media is awesome, but owning those contact details yourself in an email list means that when the social tides change (and it’s a case of when not if), you’re not left starting from scratch on a new platform with no audience.

With a well-presented lead capture form on your Facebook page, you can give visitors the chance to provide their contact details in exchange for a gift, promo code or taster.

Aweber and Mailchimp are the two email list providers that we recommend most often, and both have handy Facebook Apps that you can install on your page. You’ll need a Aweber/Mailchimp account first, but once you’re ready to install the app search Facebook for “Aweber” or “Mailchimp” and choose the APP result, not the Business Page.

For other email list managers (such as Infusionsoft), you can add a form by copying the form code into a Static HTML Facebook app.

The name that you give your lead capture form app is crucial. Call it something attractive (Free Guide to X, Discount Voucher, Free Delivery Code etc) and you’ll get people clicking on it:

Here you can see Kim has called her lead capture form “Free Twitter eBook”, so no prizes for guessing who she’s trying to attract and the bait she’s offering. She knows the score.

2. Social Media Page Apps

As if having so many different types of app wasn’t confusing enough, how about embedding one social media page inside another? With apps like Iconosquare (for Instagram), Tabsite (for Pinterest), and with YouTube and Twitter’s own apps, you can have feeds from these social networks showing up inside a tab on your Facebook page.

This is particularly important if your social media work has focused on one of the other networks and you want to make the most of that momentum and attention on Facebook too.

To add one of these apps (for example YouTube), search Facebook for “YouTube” and look for the YouTube app in the search results. If you don’t see it, click “Find More Search Results For YouTube”, then choose Apps from the sidebar. You’ll notice that there are a number of different YouTube Apps for Pages, and it’s usually the one with the most monthly active users that you want.

3. Online Booking

If you want to allow your customers to book appointments with you through your Facebook page, there are a range of apps that allow this, such as Schedulicity and Appointy. These types of service will require you to use their appointment booking software, which is rarely free with the exception of SetMore that actually has a meaningful free plan.

4. eCommerce Stores

Yes, you can build an entire store right inside your Facebook page. Now this won’t be a replacement for your own website store (or any Amazon or Ebay stores you have), but if you use an eCommerce platform that has simple integration with Facebook then it can be very simple to set up.

Platforms that offer this type of integration include Shopify and Volusion, and there are plenty of apps that work with Magento and WordPress.

5. Contest Apps

Contests drive engagement, and the more engagement your pages and posts get, the more visible they become across Facebook. From quizzes and sweepstakes to games and photo contests, there are plenty of things you can do with visitors to your Facebook page to get them interacting.

Pagemodo, Contest Domination and (Ninja favourite) Rafflecopter all have Facebook contest apps that allow you to give prizes away to your audience who compete by submitting photos, liking, visiting or commenting on your page. For all of these services, you’ll first need to create an account and set up your contest on their site. Then, once you install their companion Facebook app, you can make the contest visible through your Facebook page.

One tip which sounds obvious but warrants repeating is to make sure your prize is genuinely appealing to the audience you want to attract to your page. It can be tempting (particularly for businesses with a high-ticket product or service) to give away something small and unrelated with mass appeal. But whilst offering shopping vouchers or Amazon gift certificates as a prize can attract a lot of entries, they won’t generate you the sort of highly-engaged visitors you’re looking for. Each time your page likes get ‘diluted’ by an untargeted audience, your engagement statistics will drop and your page content will become less visible as a result.

Don’t forget that you don’t need a contest app to run a simple contest on your Facebook page though. Making a post that asks your audience to vote, like or comment is all within Facebook’s promotions Terms & Conditions. If a simple contest is all you’re after, this can save you time and money.

We’ll often outreach to bloggers and owners of successful Facebook pages and offer them a free prize to give away in a contest to their audience. They get the engagement that comes from running the contest, and they tend to pick some extra likes as a result of offering a free prize. We get exposure to their audience for the product given as a prize, and will pick up sales from the contest as a result of people seeing the product, loving it and buying it when they didn’t win.

In this contest we reached out to the owner of The Diary Of A Jewellery Lover Blog and offered them a set of LED candles, stocked by an eCommerce client of ours. She ran this post directly from her Facebook page which attracted over 300 likes, almost 400 comments and 250 shares. The product was not expensive and our client got thousands of qualified impressions in return.

As you can see, there is plenty of potential to turn your Facebook page into something a little bit more dynamic than the typical business page. One thing we’ve learned is that there are no hard and fast rules, and every audience is slightly different in their preferences and engagement habits. It’ll be up to you to experiment and find the sort of topics, apps and content that generate the most attention.

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